[Strategies that challenge or wield state power may be in tension,
but many movements use both simultaneously to transform society. ]
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MOVEMENTS HAVE A LONG HISTORY OF PLAYING THE INSIDE-OUTSIDE GAME
EFFECTIVELY  
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Andrew Willis Garcés
November 18, 2022
Waging Nonviolence
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_ Strategies that challenge or wield state power may be in tension,
but many movements use both simultaneously to transform society. _

Gina Chiala, the executive director and lead attorney at the
Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom, talks in support of the
Tenants' Right to Counsel ordinance on Wednesday morning at a rally on
the steps of City Hall, Carlos Moreno / KCUR 89.3

 

On Election Day, many on the left were watching to see if progressive
champions like Summer Lee in Pennsylvania and Greg Casar in Texas —
endorsed by Justice Democrats, Working Families Party and other
influential national left electoral strategy formations — would
continue to add to the growing national influence of the progressive
group of House lawmakers known as “The Squad.” They’re part of a
recent shift in left organizing energy towards winning elections that
began in earnest following Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign.

But in Kansas City, a different and much older movement tradition was
evident in the day’s election outcomes
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Just a month before Election Day, tenant organizers had forced
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City Council to place a question on the ballot asking voters if they
would approve raising $50 million for a housing fund and rewrite the
definition of “affordable” from units charging $1,200 a month,
down to $750 a month. 

The measure passed, and although it was the first time the local group
KC Tenants had organized voters directly (through their just-launched
501c4, KC Tenants Power), it wasn’t at all the first time they
influenced an election through direct action campaigns. The
organization got its start in 2019, and immediately began waging
campaigns targeting specific local landlords
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change housing conditions and simultaneously demanding that candidates
running in that year’s municipal election pledge to support
their platform
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They so thoroughly changed
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conversation about that election through their dramatic direct actions
and disruptive presence in candidate forums that the newly-elected
mayor followed through on a promise to spend his first night
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office in one of their members’ apartments. He also set about
championing the Tenant Bill of Rights the group drafted
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which imposed new rules on landlords and created a municipal tenant
protection agency. 

They had used a traditional outside pressure campaign to influence an
election outcome — the candidates who scored the highest on
their scorecard [[link removed]] won their races,
without KC Tenants spending a dime on partisan ads or mailers — and
used it to get a seat at the inside game, crafting policy with elected
officials. During the onset of the pandemic, the group added to the
strategies it used to improve conditions for tenants by starting a
mutual aid fund [[link removed]]. And it has continued to
rotate between outside campaigns and inside game negotiations to win
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right to counsel for all tenants in eviction court and a
community-controlled city housing fund
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Their work reflects a long left movement tradition of
using strategies
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the state,” “from the state” and “without the state” to
build power and transform conditions for working-class people, that
goes back over a hundred years in the U.S. We explore several examples
from this rich history in a podcast called “Craft of Campaigns
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left organizers, which launched this week. Some see these as distinct
tracks
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but there is a long history of movements using both simultaneously to
great effect. 

Many have heard of the Highlander Center’s role in training Black
freedom movement organizers to wage outside pressure campaigns on the
Jim Crow status quo. But the group’s founders experimented with
strategies well outside their core role as movement educators. In
1938, the center’s staff — who often worked as labor organizers
when they weren’t leading workshops — helped people building
bridges and highways with the Works Progress Administration to form
unions to advocate for higher wages. (At the time they were the
country’s lowest-paid federal workers.) 

But when workplace actions weren’t enough to achieve their goals,
and stymied by the corrupt local Democrats, they formed their own
party, the Labor’s Political Conference, with two dozen unions in
Grundy and Marion counties, and successfully elected
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road commissioners and a labor-friendly sheriff. Labor unions in
particular have a long history of openness to using both outside
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campaigns, as well as electing their own champions and members
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all levels
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the ballot.

As another example, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or
SNCC, famously organized
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“Freedom Registration” voter drives and “Freedom Vote” mock
elections as part of their outside pressure campaigns on
Mississippi’s Jim Crow power structure. And in 1964, they started
the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to force a confrontation at
the coming Democratic National Convention over the national party’s
acceptance of segregationist Democrats. 

SCLC education director Dorothy Cotton leading a Citizenship Education
workshop, 1960s. (Emory University library/SCLC records)

At the same time, many of the same organizers also ran actual voter
registration drives across the South, training 10,000 teachers to lead
Citizenship Schools from 1961-1965, which helped register over 700,000
voters by the time the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Another
million Southern Black voters registered in the following five years,
in part due to the 897 Citizenship Schools with over 100,000
participants. Many of those same organizers with the Voting Rights
Project (a collaboration between CORE, SNCC, the Urban League and the
NAACP) then helped elect the region’s first
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congressional representative in 1972. 

There were certainly different orientations to wielding state power
among Black freedom movement organizations, but there was and remains
a tradition of openness to using strategies that are in tension with
each other towards transforming real-world conditions.

And some modern left organizations associated with the post-Bernie
2016 shift to electoral strategies, like Mijente — whose affiliates
just helped elect
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other Democrats in Pennsylvania
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Carolina [[link removed]], Georgia
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well before Sanders’ near-victory against Hillary Clinton.
Galvanized by the fight [[link removed]] against
Arizona’s SB 1070 anti-immigrant bill, community organizations and
labor unions first worked to oust Sheriff Joe Arpaio with their Adiós
Arpaio effort
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2012, falling 80,000 votes short of victory. 

Four years later, organizers with Mijente’s #Not1More campaign
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direct actions against federal and local targets across the
country. Inspired
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part by Chicago’s #ByeAnita campaign
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action and electoral mobilization to replace Cook County State’s
Attorney Anita Alvarez, Mijente launched a new effort called Bazta
Arpaio that successfully mobilized thousands of newly registered
Latines and voted the sheriff out of office. (The organization also
resources its Latine members who are using “without the state”
mutual aid strategies [[link removed]],
drawing on the legacy of the Young Lords and Black Panthers, offering
small grants and coaching for “sin el estado” collective
projects.)

It goes without saying: Both campaigning to get candidates elected and
holding elected officials accountable present tensions and
contradictions for left organizers whose ultimate goals are to
transform our society and create a true multiracial democracy. And we
have hundreds of real-world examples from which to draw insights about
how to navigate those tensions. Indeed, it’s vital for us as
organizers to know our history of strategic convergence, which has
resulted in numerous movement victories that have changed our material
conditions, than it is to understand the ideological roots of the
debate over using one strategy to the exclusion of another.

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* Political Strategies; KC Tenants; Mijente; SNCC;
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